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Rejoinder to Stuart Soroka, “Policy Agenda-Setting Theory Revisited: A Critique of Howlett on Downs, Baumgartner and Jones, and Kingdon”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Michael Howlett
Michael Howlett
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
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Extract

I am pleased to respond to Stuart Soroka's set of criticisms of the concepts, methodology and conclusions of my research into Canadian federal agenda-setting. My two articles were not intended to be the last word on the subject, and I am glad to see that they have sparked some interest and, hopefully, some future additional research into the subject. That having been said, let me make several points with respect to the central issues raised in the discussion and the general arguments made about the role of empirical research in the policy sciences.

Type
Comment/Commentaire
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , December 1999 , pp. 773 - 779
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1999

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References

1 Soroka, Stuart, “Policy Agenda-Setting Theory Revisited: A Critique of Howlett on Downs, Baumgartner and Jones, and Kingdon,” this Journal 32 (1999), 763–772Google Scholar. For my original articles, see Howlett, Michael, “Issue-Attention and Punctuated Equilibria Models Reconsidered: An Empirical Examination of the Dynamics of Agenda-Setting in Canada,” this Journal 30 (1997), 3–29Google Scholar; and “Predictable and Unpredictable Policy Windows: Institutional and Exogenous Correlates of Canadian Federal Agenda-Setting,” this Journal 31 (1998), 495–524Google Scholar.

2 On the general tendency in political science to oscillate between scientism and hermeneutics, see Roger M. Smith, “Still Blowing in the Wind: the American Quest for a Democratic, Scientific Political Science,” and Lindblom, Charles E., “Political Science in the 1940s and 1950s,” in Bender, Thomas and Schorske, Carl E., eds., American Academic Culture in Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 243–305Google Scholar.

3 See, for example, Keith Dowding's dismissal of network theory in Dowding, Keith, “Model or Metaphor? A Critical Review of the Policy Network Approach,” Political Studies 43 (1995) 136–158CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See, for example, Howlett, Michael and Ramesh, M., “Policy Subsystem Configurations and Policy Change: Operationalizing the Postpositivist Analysis of the Politics of the Policy Process,” Policy Studies Journal 26 (1998), 466–482CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Soroka, “Policy Agenda-Setting Theory Revisited,” 764.

6 Ibid., 769.

7 And, if further justification is required in the case of the use of such a measure to help evaluate Downs's work, it must be noted that Downs was aware of the difficulty of assessing unmediated public sentiments and specifically highlighted the role played by the media in filtering this information to politicians. The related criticism, that this relationship will vary by type of issue, was specifically suggested by Downs in his formulation of the three principal characteristics of issues susceptible to issue-attention cycles, and tested for in the two articles. That the issue-attention cycle applies only to “unexciting problems” (ibid., 764) is a conclusion 1 find nowhere in Downs's work, which was directed, in the first instance, to understanding environmental problems and policy making—a subject which is far from “unexciting,” by any measure.

8 An early example being Eldredge, Niles and Gould, Stephen Jay, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” in Schopf, T. J. M., ed., Paleobiology (San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper, 1972), 82–115Google Scholar.

9 That the type of windows are not mutually exclusive would only be a concern if a strict taxonomy was being put forward. In the article, however, it is being argued that a spectrum of windows exists with major categories being placed along the spectrum. It should not be surprising, then, if some overlaps were found to exist in specific cases.

10 Case selection, of course, is a significant, related, but separate concern. See George, Alexander L., “Case Studies and Theory Development: The Method of Structured, Focused Comparison,” in Lauren, P. G., ed., Diplomacy: New Approaches in History, Theory and Policy (New York: Free Press, 1979), 43–68Google Scholar.

11 Soroka, “Policy Agenda-Setting Revisited,” 772.